by Monika Korra
“Papa,” I said, “I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be here in the same world with people who do such evil things. I just don’t understand—”
For a moment, my father was silent, and we both stopped and stood staring. Across the street was the Løten Idrettspark, where the track and soccer fields lay beneath a layer of snow. In the distance a large family, the half dozen or so kids filing behind the parents like ducklings, skied along the forest trail. Their peals of laughter caught the wind and took off like kites passing over our heads.
My father toed the ground with his boot and then, his tone trying to mask his own weariness and confusion, he said slowly, “So what are you going to do, then? Where else can you possibly go?”
I knew he was right, that often the act of surviving begins as no more than a kind of biological imperative. I’d spent my whole life moving, skiing, running, traveling to compete, leaving home to attend school. All of it with the idea that moving forward, not staying rooted in place, was how you lived your life and discovered what made you happy. My father and I set off again, stride for stride in silence.
Thoughts about distance had me preoccupied. The holidays were good and I enjoyed Little Christmas Eve with my parents and with my aunt and uncle. On Christmas Eve we went to church, and I sat there thinking about what it was that lay ahead for the baby Jesus, that in a few short months people would gather together in that same place and commemorate His painful death. I wasn’t a particularly devout Christian, but I did believe in God, and the enormous sacrifice he asked of his Son was difficult to understand. I’d always thought that Jesus was a supreme being even though he walked the Earth and that it was somehow easier for him to deal with being hung from a cross.
This could have been my funeral, I thought.
I envisioned the casket there in front of the pulpit, my family sitting where we now sat, without me. If that gun had fired.
To keep a tear from spilling down my face, I lifted my head toward the church’s ceiling. I’d been attending services there my whole life, and in that moment the ceiling’s blue skies and perfectly shaped white clouds had never resonated so deeply within me. That idealized version of heaven appealed to me. I thought that if I couldn’t be here alive, I wouldn’t mind being in a place like that—somewhere very much like the beautiful outdoors I treasured. I would have spent time with my mom’s parents, getting to know them in death in a way that wasn’t possible while I was alive. My grandmother had died long before I was born, my grandfather just after. I knew that their passing had been difficult for my mother but made her strong in ways I was only beginning to fully understand. It would have been so easy for her to have gotten lost in her sorrows, drifted away. But she hadn’t.
The congregation rose, and the first notes of the organ brought my attention back to the present. Anette took my hand firmly in her own, and I was once again grounded, grateful to be here instead of there, secure in the knowledge that this was where I was meant to be, where I needed to be, where I wanted to be.
Earlier that day, we’d gone to my grandparents’ grave site as we always did on Christmas Eve. My mother laid a bouquet of flowers against the headstone, the blood-red roses stark against the snow, their cellophane wrapper snapping in the wind. When my mother stood back up, I saw that her eyes were tearing, whether from the wind or her emotions or some combination of both, I couldn’t say. I thought then about how we as human beings weather things—storms, misfortune, and all the rest.
My father put his arm around my mom, and we all huddled together in a semicircle, sheltering one another from the wind. My mother’s hands shook slightly as she raised the lighter to the memorial candle’s wick; it caught and went out, then caught again as we drew our circle tighter.
“Mama. Father.” My mother’s strong voice cut through the blustery winds. “I just want to let you both know that we’re all doing well.”
She looked at me, and I felt her strength pouring into me, warming me and reassuring me.
“We all miss you, and we thank you for what you taught us. We’ll see you someday, but for now, we still have a lot of living to do, and we’re going to make you proud.”
We lingered there in the stinging cold, our arms wrapped around one another, and I looked up into the blue sky, saw the imperfect clouds smeared across it, and thought I’d never seen anything so beautiful. I was never more grateful to be home and to be held.
—
I’M HUMAN, SO it was hard for me to shed other, more earthly concerns. I was struggling to let go of how much I had been looking forward to being with my friends at home. It was hard to reconcile the past with the present. When we were younger, I spent nearly every day with one or another, and often with all five, of my closest girlfriends.
Now we could barely communicate at all. We decided that the twenty-eighth would work for us all—Christmas would be over and New Year’s not yet arrived, a kind of odd middle ground, a time to be filled on a calendar of days after and days before.
I had really hoped someone else would volunteer to host the get-together this time because I was so tired, but I tried to put that aside because I really just wanted to see them. The morning of the party, they were all going to go skiing, but I said that I would have to stay home to prepare. I thought maybe someone would say, “I’ll help you,” but no one did. My mother and sister went shopping with me to buy the food, and then I set out to prepare it.
At first I told myself that it was just the chopped onions that had me in tears, but as I stood there with the knife poised above the chopping block, I suddenly felt like I couldn’t breathe. I stood there wondering why it was that I was the one doing all of this work while the rest of them were off having fun. I wanted to be having fun along with them. I wanted to be back in Portugal with them at the training camp we attended, walking the streets of Cascais and stumbling upon the best ice cream we’d ever eaten, sitting on the seawall sharing bites and moaning in ecstasy and laughing at our reactions. It was hard to believe that only a few months before we’d gone again to Gothenburg together to compete in the Världsungdomsspelen, a major track meet in Gothenburg, Sweden.
Despite all kinds of other obligations and commitments, we’d set aside four days after the competition to be together. We’d shopped together, planned and eaten an elaborate (at least for us) picnic lunch in a park, gone to clubs and danced for hours, gone back to our rooms and fretted about boys and shared our fears that we were all going to end up alone, without men in our lives, but felt glad that we’d at least have one another.
The knife clattering to the floor brought my mother running into the kitchen. She found me slumped against the cabinets, my shoulders shaking as I sobbed and sobbed, saying over and over again, “I can’t do this.”
My mother sank down beside me and wrapped me in her arms. “It’s okay. You need this. Let it out.”
We sat there for a few minutes, until I felt like every ounce of water in my body had come out of me. My mother held my face between her hands, and our foreheads touched. She looked intently at me, clearly angry. “They shouldn’t have expected this of you, Monika. Someone else should have taken the lead this time.”
We both knew that my reaction and her anger weren’t just about the food or the preparations. It was the anxiety of seeing all of them when none of them had come over to see me or even shown much of a desire to talk to me since I’d been home. Now all five of them were supposed to be coming over together, and I felt like an outsider. I didn’t know how to act or what to say. Surely they’d read the article about me, and yet no one was talking, telling me that they were sorry this had happened to me and that they’d be here to support me. Wouldn’t I have done that much for any of them? I wondered.
Once again, Anette stepped up to defend me. She came in and saw the two of us sitting on the floor. She turned and walked away, then returned a moment later with her coat on.
“I’ll be back.”
She returned a half hour later. Sh
e’d talked to Dania and met with all of the girls. Anette let them know how I was feeling, both that night and about how they’d been treating me. She let them have their say about how awkward they felt and how they struggled with not knowing what to say. Anette told them that pretending like the rape didn’t happen was like denying that I existed. That’s all I needed, to be acknowledged, to have the truth acknowledged and then to move on. The rape wasn’t all of who I was, it was just one part of who I was, but at that stage, it felt like they were denying the existence of all of me. They all cried and said that they would reach out to me. The dinner was off; I hoped the friendships wouldn’t be.
After that I got a few brief phone calls from them, and we did make one more attempt at getting together, but I had to cancel because I was too exhausted. I had put so much emphasis on Christmas and making things all seem okay that I had little energy left after that. In a way, the breakdown the night of the dinner party was a good thing. It made me acknowledge that I was tired in every way it is possible to be tired—physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. While I had been telling myself that my ski outings and my planning for social visits and everything else were completely healthy, they were all part of an act. The facts were the facts, and to behave otherwise was hurtful. With the holidays over and that big breakdown behind me, things got better. I still felt at times as if a dark cloud was hanging over me, but I started to sense that it was, like the weather itself, subject to changes and influences that I could come to understand but likely would never be able to control entirely.
I had tried very hard that first year away from home to keep in touch with everyone. I wanted to believe that I was still the same Monika, that my success hadn’t changed me just as the rape hadn’t. I can see now that in some ways this break from my friends back home was inevitable. They had their new lives, some had moved to other places, and we all just walked away from our collective past. I don’t know if anything would have come of us talking about that holiday, or if it was better to leave things as they lay. I’m not sure that I wanted to hear their answers, or if it was better to just remember the good parts.
Change could be good. Change could be bad. Change was inevitable, frustrating, frightening, invigorating, thrilling.
I was just beginning to understand how my relationship to that aspect of existence was going to play such a crucial role in my life.
One thing that wasn’t going to change was my decision to return to Dallas. With all the ups and downs I experienced while being home, I never altered my plan to return. I had been given an opportunity to pursue a lifelong dream. Dallas and SMU were a means to achieve my goal of making my living as a runner. I couldn’t let the rape end that dream. I better understood after being home that it wasn’t going to be possible for things to return to normal instantly, that I couldn’t just ignore my way back to a good place mentally and emotionally, and I also couldn’t just wait for things to turn around in my life. I had to be assertive. I had to pursue getting better and healing from the attack. Those moments when I had to be passive and allow those men to do horrible things to me were the worst kind of necessity; I’d allowed those things to be done to me in order to survive. What would all of that suffering mean if I gave up? I’d had to surrender my body to those men on that night, but I wasn’t going to give up control to them now, I wasn’t going to allow them to take my dream from me.
Dallas didn’t belong to those rapists. Dallas was mine.
CHAPTER NINE
My Dallas
Of course, before there was Dallas there were more tears. The tears came at the airport, but they were different somehow. I wasn’t afraid of what I was going to have to face on my return. I knew that I was doing the right thing by going back, but I was going to miss my family even more than before. As my mother held me in a tight hug, I remembered what she’d said to me a few nights earlier. As we talked about some of the more painful events of that night, she’d smiled and said, “Monika, I don’t know where you get your strength from.”
I told her that I got it from her, from Anette, from Papa. How they’d treated me that whole winter break, how I knew that no matter whether I’d decided to return to Dallas, stay home, or take a break from school and become a beach bum in the Bahamas, they would have supported me. They’d have been concerned that I have the proper sunscreen if the islands were in my future, but that’s the extent of the worry that they would have expressed. As I flew back to Dallas, alone this time, it occurred to me that they hadn’t said much about my safety or their worries. That meant a lot to me. Not just that I didn’t need to have the worst-case scenarios brought to my attention, but that they trusted me, and by extension, they trusted this world. We all agreed that a bad thing had been done to me, but that we had to do everything we could to move past that point.
Yes, we talked a little bit about how unfair it was that these men singled me out, but they never questioned whether or not anyone had failed to protect me—not my friends, not the school, not the police, not American culture. They treated the rape as it was—a random act, not a part of a larger pattern that reflected how rotten the world was, or how much of a mistake it had been for me to travel so far away from home. We didn’t say these words exactly, but because of how they’d always welcomed opportunities for me to travel and encouraged me to experience new things, the message was clear: I had to live my life on my own terms. My parents had told me this before, and though my rape was not something any of us could have envisioned, life was going to throw obstacles in my path. How I responded to those obstacles was far more important than what I had to overcome.
I thought of my choice to become a steeplechaser in the spring of 2008, before coming to SMU. I accepted the idea that I had to run those laps knowing that with predicted regularity I was going to have to leap over that barrier and the water pit. When my coach first approached me with the idea of me taking on the challenge of running three thousand meters, jumping over a thirty-inch barrier, and trying to cross a twelve-foot-long water pit, I felt a thrill of pleasure. This was a huge challenge, especially considering my lack of height. That he trusted I had the tenacity to take it on meant a lot to me. Distance running was one thing, the steeplechase another. I’d have to master a new technique, similar to what a hurdler does in clearing those obstacles, and I was eager to get started.
The first day I worked on my steeplechase technique, I was fearless. I approached the first obstacle, carrying good speed as I’d been told, planted my left leg firmly, and led with my right leg up. The ground flashed beneath me, and then suddenly I was lying on the track, my cheek feeling the stubble of the rubberized surface. I tried to take a breath, but felt as if my chest were paralyzed.
Confused about what had happened, and with my brain receiving messages from various body outposts about damage done, I lay there. I could see other athletes staring at me, wondering what had happened to Little Monika, feeling sorry for me.
Still lying flat on my stomach, I pressed my scraped palms into the track and lifted myself into the push-up position. From there, I walked my legs toward my chest and stood. I could feel the burned flesh of my knees and elbows tingling, but I resisted the temptation to look down to assess how bad things were. I spun on my heel and trotted away from the pit, my mother’s words about getting right back onto the horse in my mind.
I knew that dwelling on the fact that I’d fallen would only make room in my mind for fear. Thirty yards down the track I turned back again and set out. I measured my steps and did what I’d done before, but with every cell in my body helping me rise higher, I cleared the barrier by more than two feet. Not exactly the best technique, since it required a greater expenditure of energy, but there was no way I wasn’t going to get over that steeple.
What mattered wasn’t that I’d fallen, but that I’d gotten back up. Sure, I was self-conscious and hoped that no one had seen my awkward attempt at steeplechase mastery, but as I continued around the track, I thought it didn’t matter that
I’d been clumsy. Just because I’d fallen didn’t mean I was doomed to fall every time. Look ahead, I had told myself that afternoon. Never let your past paint your future. A few months later, and after quite a few steeple workouts, of course, I qualified for the Junior World Championship in the three-thousand-meter steeplechase.
What I was dealing with now was similar to that initial experience with the steeplechase—I didn’t know exactly when the next hurdle would present itself, but I had the skills to get over it. Life was unpredictable, but those surprises were more likely to be pleasant and not painful. I’d always been very optimistic, and there was no reason for that to change.
As if to confirm the view that life’s surprises could be good, bad, or to be determined later, soon after I returned to Dallas, I met two women who would play significant roles in my life.
The first, I met shortly after I returned to SMU. After another frustrating workout when I felt as if my fitness level was never going to return to previous levels, Petra, another international student, from Sweden (a member of the equestrian team), came up to me and said, “This may seem a little odd, but a woman I know wants to meet you. She said she’d like to take us to lunch. She’s a nice woman.”
I was skeptical at first, wondering if maybe she was a reporter. I couldn’t figure out why she would have an interest in meeting me.
“She’s a wonderful woman,” Petra explained. “I’ve been to her house a few times, and she’s a very cool person. Her name is Kelly Green, and she heard what happened. She’d like to help out. That’s how she is. She’s taken an interest in other international students. She’s not from here originally.”
